Sample Poems by Joanne Allred

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Outside Paradise

Paradise, a town of 26,000, was mostly razed, the inferno
Leaving just a handful of dwellings. Once a mining hamlet, it lay
East of our canyon and, with the diablo wind hurling flames, this
Alignment put us smack in the line of fire. Our friend Paul,
Staying in his RV on our land, heard the barrage of propane tanks
Exploding on the ridge as he evacuated, snagging my laptop

Computer on the way out—a small but true salvation.
Of course I’d long since taken the metaphoric
Measure of living just outside Paradise, as if we were
Exiles before being driven from our Eden.

However you parse it, the devastation was biblical. My old poem,
“Outside Paradise,” began Sun is gauzed like a wound and ended
Menacing absence, architect of grief, once omnipresent beloved
Explain how I have fallen, you out of reach. I don’t recall

From which passing hell those lines flared up,
Only that I’d been reading Milton. Now my whole life felt beyond
Reach. Lost in the oblivion of loss itself.

Christ, that poem was melodramatic. But so is Paradise Lost.
How blind Milton composed those 90,000 lines of iambic pentameter
Remains a wonder and a mystery. The world had gone dark, but his
Insight into the original myth of homelessness is brilliant.
Sightlessness is a kind of exile.
The main characters—Eve, Adam, Satan and his
Minions—are outcasts. And isn’t that the point—that we
All hunger for some gone primal home? Condemned to
Separateness we seek blindly, as if sifting ashes, for a lost paradise.

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Later

Well, there’s life, and then there’s later, wrote Mary
Oliver after she’d left Provincetown, after her beloved had died and
Nothing there compelled her enough stay—not the meadows and coastline
That she’d worn like second skin, creatures her next of kin. She had

Gone to Florida of all places. About the past
One thing is always true: it’s over. Still, a long-time

Home grows into the bones. And the mind resists staying
Only in the present, tugging at the leash, sniffing back for the familiar.
Maybe it’s myself I miss, she wrote. For what is the self if not
Everything one has loved? 

Well, there’s life and then there’s later
Implies later is epilogue, or an interim
Temporary existence. Purgatory. Mine commenced without
Herald as I sat on a futon in my daughter’s study watching a video
Online, posted by a firefighter, of the covered bridge in flames. It
Undeceived me of hope that my house survived the wildfire a
Tenuous mile away. I couldn’t imagine next. Forget later.
Yet driving to Costco to buy new underwear I thought not exactly
Okay, but that losing everything may be something like dying: not
Unaware, but stripped clean in an alien realm. The life you loved in ashes.

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Lucky

All around evidence of my good fortune shone. Newly

Homeless families camped in the Walmart parking lot,
Over three-thousand with no place to go. I felt sorry for myself
Until driving past tent cities, cozy in my car as the cold
Season plunged. I had a bed and a heater in my daughter’s study.
Even just living seemed lucky with the dead still being counted.

Initially over six-hundred people were reported missing.
So many had literally run for their lives. In clogged traffic my 

Nephew saw people a few vehicles away incinerated alive.
Of course beside that my story is a happy one.
The dawn-yellow sky when I left home in the canyon had bled to

A deep umber when, returning, I found Honey Run Road closed.
Hope decayed all day as a massive black blimp
Oozed further from the ridge—its blunt nose edged crisp blue
Marking before and after. 14,000 houses burned. Good luck didn’t
Eclipse the excruciating personal.

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Hard

Reeling still, days after our house burned, I head for the coast
On 299 to stay with my younger daughter. Near Willow Creek a billboard
Shows a man slumped against a wall—knees drawn up, elbows gaveled
Into thighs, face sunk in hands—lost in his own Gethsemane. It
Edges the gravel parking lot of a wayside chapel. I know

Why his posture resonates: he’s grappling with life, a goblet dropped
On concrete, shattered. The caption reads
Nothing’s too hard for God. I don’t believe in a god
That bites into troubles we humans gnaw, but

Yearning for some benevolence to lift or guide
Opens in me like a crater. What’s gone is
Unrecoverable, still I imagine pulling over, entering the hushed

Place with its musk of devotion and blown-out candles,
Lines of pine benches and the
Echo of hymns. But I can’t persuade myself
A being in the unseen gives a shit about my grain-
Sized existence. I lost everything I owned
Except my car, the clothes I left in, and my dogs, all

Consumed by a wildfire that’s still swelling and will be choked
Only by a rainstorm not yet in the forecast. I don’t get
Mystery’s gadgetry, but know life can leave any of us desperate,
Eager to take for gospel any light that shines a way.

Haven’t you ached to waive the guesswork of being human?
Overhead a V of Canada geese navigates south by stars and earth’s
Magnetic field. Moon’s gravity ferries shifting tides. Trees
Exhale oxygen. Dispassionate grandeur allows for everything.